Blog: The Placebo Effect - 2016-12-29

The lead article in last month's (Dec '16) National Geographic Magazine is about the placebo effect, or as they subtitled the piece on the cover, "The Healing Power of Faith."

Since everything is true on the Internet, I pulled this definition of the placebo effect: "a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment."

For thousands of years humans have been going to "healers with the hope that they can make us feel better. And just as a good performance in a theater can draw us in until we feel we're watching something real, the theater of healing is designed to draw us in by creating powerful expectations in our brains. These expectations drive the so-called placebo effect, which can affect what happens in our bodies as well." NG. Scientists are now, "seeing placebos as a window into the neurochemical mechanisms that connect the mind with the body, belief with experience." NG.